Thursday, September 07, 2006

So apparently one of the posts I've missed doing was about finding RSS feeds. Once upon a time, I was a big devotee of using Syndic8.com to find new feeds.

That was before I found Bloglines; at the time, I was using (and paying for) NewsGator, which brings the feeds directly into your Outlook mailbox. It was nice, but I couldn't use it to check posts at both work and at home without overlapping and accidentally reading the same entries two or more times.

When using Bloglines, I tended to use the blog search facility built into Bloglines itself. That quickly gave way to use the Bloglines extension in Firefox, which lets you add a feed to your Bloglines account just by right-clicking on the originating page.

To be honest, I don't use Bloglines very much anymore. It just doesn't let me do as much organization as I'd like. NetVibes is my current RSS reader. NetVibes lets you arrange feeds on tabs, so you can easily group them by subject, and offers other customizable features. They just got a large sum of money ($15 million, to be precise) to use for future development, so who knows what else they will add. Despite using NetVibes as my primary RSS reader, I still tend to search for new feeds at Bloglines.

Although NetVibes is the website where I usually read my RSS feeds, it's not really my favorite way to do that. I prefer the feed reader that is part of Mobipocket Reader 5. It's a self-contained program that launches its own Internet window when necessary, and it's great at organizing feed entries you'd like to keep for later viewing or reference, and keeping them distinct from unread entries. I really like it, and on my home computer it runs beautifully. But my work machine just can't deal with it, for some reason ...